The remarkable figurine of a harpy which the Trust discovered during our excavations at Brightlingsea, near Colchester in Essex, has now been cleaned by a conservator and is revealed in full detail. On Tuesday (26th May), the Current Archaeology magazine posted a brief item about the harpy on their web-site, which was written by Trust director Philip. They Tweeted a message about the item, which the Trust retweeted: you can read the item at www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/revealed-the-brightlingsea-harpy.htm . Current Archaeology is including an article about the harpy in their next issue of the magazine (no 304), which will be available in the first week of June.
The harpy was actually discovered by Trust archaeologist Ben Holloway in September 2014, but we didn’t reveal it until Easter, when we posted an item about it on this web-site on the 4th April. News of the harpy generated a huge amount of interest on the internet. An item was posted on the BAJR web-site on the 7th April at www.bajrfed.co.uk/bajrpress/bronze-harpy-find-from-brightlingsea-site/ and on the Archaeology web-site on the 9th April at www.archaeology.org/news/3189-150409-colchester-bronze-harpy .
Today (29th May), Trust director Philip has also embellished his brief item about the harpy so that it can published on the web-site of the excavation site landowner Brett: ‘… A harpy was a mythical monster in the shape of a bird with a human face. They snatched earthly evil-doers and took them to other mythical beasts known as the Furies who punished and tormented them. Many people who had never heard of harpies will know about them now because of the gold harpy which figures so prominently in the hit TV series Game of Thrones.
Our harpy is a foot which has broken off a small metal brazier such as might have been used to help heat a Roman bath-house. The piece was found in a Roman-period field ditch in a quarry near Colchester where we were recently working. The ditch produced some Roman pottery sherds and fragments of roof-tile. These finds are very run-of-the-mill, apart from the harpy which sticks out like a sore thumb, being relatively exotic. The six-hectare site produced very little Roman material and the Roman-period field ditch is close to the edge of the site where the land starts to slope gently down to the River Colne. Several Roman villas were sited in this sort of location along the river valley. Perhaps there is an undiscovered villa nearby which would explain the presence of the Roman building materials and the harpy. Certainly the owners of the brazier must have been well off to have been able to afford such a fine piece of equipment.
The harpy is 98 mm high. It is made of copper-alloy. Traces in the eyes suggest they were of glass …’.
The image shows the cleaned figurine of the harpy.
Interestingly, on the 22nd May, Kay Sunahara of the Royal Ontario Museums Tweeted a photo. of a Roman harpy from Pompeii, deriving from an item of furniture, which she was uncrating for an exhibition (photo. shown below). Visit the Royal Ontario Museum web-site at www.rom.on.ca/en .
.
